A more difficult question is raised by the absence of Haiti and Porto Rico from these maps, with all the more eastward Antilles. But it is possible that they may not have been visited or even seen. We can imagine an expedition that would touch Great Abaco, coast along Florida and Cuba, and visit Jamaica, returning out of sight, or with little notice, of the Haitian coast and barely passing an islet or two of the Bahamas, which, if not sufficiently commemorated in a general way by Insula in Mar, might well be disregarded. A report of such an expedition, adding that Antillia was directly opposite Portugal and of about equal size, would account fairly for the map which for half a century was faithfully repeated even in details by many different hands and evidently confidently believed in.
Unless we accept this explanation, we must assume an uncanny, almost an inspired, gift of conjecture in some one who, without basis, could imagine and depict the only array of great islands in the Atlantic. Certainly the outlines of Cuba, Jamaica, Florida, and one of the Bahamas will very well bear comparison with Scandinavia or the Hebrides and the Orkneys as given on maps of equal or even later date. Some glaring errors are to be expected in such work, as notoriously occurred in the sixteenth-century treatment of Newfoundland and Labrador. Applying the same tests and canons and making the same allowances as in these cases of distortion of undoubtedly actual lands, we may be reasonably confident that the Antillia of 1435 was really, as now, the Queen of the Antilles.
CHAPTER XI
CORVO, OUR NEAREST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR
Far at sea from Portugal, straggling in a long northwestward line toward America, lies the archipelago sometimes called the Islands of the Sun or the Western Islands but now generally known as the Azores. That line breaks into three divisions separated by wide gaps of sea: the most easterly pair, St. Michael and St. Mary; the main cluster of five islands, Pico being the loftiest and Terceira the most important; and the northwesterly pair, Flores and Corvo. These last make a little far-severed world of their own, sharing in none of the tremors and upheavals which from time to time more or less transform parts of the other two divisions. The remote origin of the pair was volcanic, and Corvo is little more now than an old crater lifted about 300 feet above the surface; but the fires have long been dead, and in historic times the lower strata have never shifted suddenly to produce any great earthquake. There have been changes, but they must be attributed for the most part to gradual subsidence.
These two islands, though almost as near to Newfoundland as to any point in Portugal, cannot be classed as American; yet Corvo in particular seems to have impressed the imagination of ancient and medieval explorers with a sense of some special relation to regions beyond, though possibly only to the entangling Sargasso Sea of weeds, which would lie next in order southwestward ([Fig. 1]), and the menacing mysteries of the remoter wastes of the Atlantic. It may have been felt as the last stepping stone for the leap into the great unknown.
Origin of the Name
Flores, the island of flowers, thus prettily renamed by the Portuguese, is referred to as the rabbit island, Li Conigi, in the fourteenth-century maps and records; but Corvo has always borne, in substance, the same name, one of the oldest on the Atlantic. Probably the very first instance of its use is in the Book of the Spanish Friar,[267] written about 1350 (the author says he was born in 1305), rather recently published in Spanish and since translated for the Hakluyt Society publications by Sir Clements Markham. After relating alleged visits to more accessible islands of the eastern Atlantic archipelagoes, from Lanzarote and Tenerife of the Canaries to São Jorge (St. George) of the Azores, he continues: “another, Conejos [doubtless Li Conigi], another, Cuervo Marines [Corvo—the sea crow island], so that altogether there are 25 islands.”
This account may not actually be later than the Atlante Mediceo map,[268] attributed to 1351—may even have been suggested by it, as some things seem to indicate. The Friar’s voyages are perhaps merely imaginary, their variety and total extent being hardly believable. This very important map has been best reproduced in the collection by Theobald Fischer; on it the same name (Corvi Marinis) seems to be applied to both islands collectively, the plural form “insule” being used to introduce it. Both names appear on the Catalan map of 1375.[269] It is more than probable that they date at least from the earlier half of the fourteenth century.
Possibly the name Corvo had been carried over by a somewhat free translation from the older Moorish seamen and cartographers, who dominated this part of the outer ocean from the eighth century to the twelfth. Edrisi,[270] greatest of Arab geographers, writing for King Roger of Sicily about the middle of the twelfth century, tells us, among other items, of the eastern Atlantic: